Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian who teaches at Boston College. She writes a blog called “Letters from an American,” in which she brings historical perspective to current events. She posted this column yesterday about Joe Biden’s first year as President.

Joe Biden’s presidency is just over a year old.

Biden has embraced the old idea, established by the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that in a democracy, the federal government has a responsibility to keep the playing field level for all. It must regulate business to maintain competition and prevent corporations from abusing their employees, protect civil rights, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure.

Our forty-sixth president came into office in the midst of crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had killed more than 407,000 Americans, and the previous president’s quest to radicalize voters in spring 2020 had led to angry mobs rejecting the preventive measures other countries took. The economy was bottoming out as the pandemic killed workers, discombobulated workplaces, and disrupted supply chains. And the previous president was so determined not to give up power that he had incited his followers to attack Congress and the U.S. Capitol during the formal ceremony acknowledging Biden’s victory.

Even after the horrors of that day, 147 members of the Republican Party doubled down on the lie that Trump had really won the election. And when the Democratic House impeached Trump for inciting the insurrection, ending our country’s 224-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power, Republican senators acquitted him.

Republican lawmakers’ support for the Big Lie indicated how they would approach Biden’s presidency. They stand diametrically opposed to Biden, rejecting Democrats’ vision of the federal government. They are eager to return power to the states to do as they will, recognizing that the end of federal regulation will give far more freedom to people of wealth and that the end of federal protection of civil rights will, in certain states, permit white evangelical Christians to reclaim the “traditional” society they crave.

Biden set out to use government to make people’s lives better and, apparently, believed that successful policies would bring enough Republicans behind his program to ease the country’s extreme partisanship.

He fought the pandemic by invoking the Defense Production Act, buying more vaccines, working with states to establish vaccine sites and transportation to them, and establishing vaccine centers in pharmacies across the country. Vaccinations took off, and he vowed to make sure that 70% of the U.S. adult population would have one vaccine shot and 160 million U.S. adults would be fully vaccinated by July 4th.

At the same time, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to jump-start the economy by putting money into the pockets of ordinary Americans.The new law cut child poverty in half by putting $66 billion into 36 million households. It expanded access to the Affordable Care Act, enabling more than 4.6 million Americans who were not previously insured to get healthcare coverage and bringing the total covered to a record 13.6 million.

Money from those programs bolstered household savings and fired up consumer spending. By the end of the year, U.S. companies were showing 15% profit margins, higher than they have been since 1950. Companies reduced their debt, which translated to a strong stock market. In February, Biden’s first month in office, the jobless rate was 6.2%; by December it had dropped to 4.2%. This means that 4.1 million jobs were created in the Biden administration’s first year, more than were created in the 12 years of the Trump and George W. Bush administrations combined.

Then, in November, Congress passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will repair bridges and roads and get broadband to places that still don’t have it.

U.S. economic output jumped more than 7% in the last three months of 2021. Overall growth for 2021 should be about 6%, and economists predict growth of around 4% in 2022—the highest numbers the U.S. has seen in decades, and higher than any other country in the world. Despite the increased spending, the federal budget deficit in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022 dropped 33% from that of 2021. The downside of this growth was inflation of up to 7%, but this is a global problem and exactly why it’s happening is unclear—increased spending has created pent-up demand, and prices have been unstable because of the pandemic.

Biden reoriented U.S. foreign policy to defend democracy. He immediately took steps to rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, and he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to rebuild the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to replace our outdated focus on combating terrorism on the ground with combating it by defunding terrorists. Biden ended the unpopular 20-year war in Afghanistan and negotiated the exit of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, where we had been for more than 18 years. About 2500 U.S. personnel remain alongside their Iraqi counterparts to hold back remaining ISIS terrorists.

The end of those wars has also given Biden the room virtually to eliminate the U.S. use of drone strikes and airstrikes. In Trump’s first 11 months he authorized more than 1600 airstrikes; Biden has significantly tightened the process of authorization and has authorized 4.

Instead of focusing on soldiers, Biden dramatically increased the use of economic sanctions on international criminals and prosecutions for international criminal behavior to stop the flow of money to terrorists. Biden’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, also helped to hammer out an international minimum tax that will help to close foreign tax shelters.

Biden is turning to these financial tools and the strength of NATO to try to stop another Russian incursion into Ukraine. He has warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that military aggression into a sovereign country will lead to crippling economic backlash, and U.S. ally Germany has put off approval of the valuable Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline Russia has constructed to Europe, worth tens of billions of dollars.

By any historical measure, Biden’s first year has been a roaring success, proving that democracy can, in fact, provide better lives for its people and can protect the rule of law internationally. And yet Biden’s popularity hovers in the low 40s.

Biden’s worldview demands that government accomplish things; the Republicans simply have to say no. They have focused on stopping Biden and the success of his view of government, and because it is only the Democrats who are in the arena, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it, Democrats are bearing the weight of popular discontent.

When the withdrawal from Afghanistan initially produced chaos as the Afghan government collapsed, Republicans hammered on the idea that Biden—and by extension a Democratic government—was incompetent. His numbers began to plummet, and the subsequent success of the largest human airlift in history did not change that narrative.

If Afghanistan happened organically, criticism of government could also be manufactured. In July, as the vaccination program appeared to be meeting Biden’s goals, Republicans began to insist that government vaccine outreach was government tyranny. Vaccination rates began to drop off just as the contagious Delta variant began to rage. When Biden tried to address the falling vaccination rates by requiring that federal workers and contractors, health care workers, and workers at businesses with more than 100 employees be vaccinated or frequently tested, Republicans railed that he was destroying American freedom.

Their argument took hold: by early December, 40% of Republican adults were unvaccinated, compared with fewer than 10% of adult Democrats, making Republicans three times more likely than Democrats to die of Covid. Rather than ending and giving Biden a historical success, the pandemic has continued on, weakening the economy and sparking chaos over masks and school reopenings as Republicans radicalize. Just last week, a woman in Virginia threatened to come to her child’s school with “every single gun loaded and ready” if the school board required masks.

That radicalization, stoked by Republican leaders, is at the point of destroying, once and for all, the idea of a government that works for the people. Republican leaders have stood by as Trump and his lackeys goaded followers into believing that Democratic governance is illegitimate and that Democrats must be kept from power. Following a playbook Republicans have used since 1994, Trump and his loyalists insisted—and continue to insist—on ongoing “audits” of the 2020 vote, knowing that seeing such “investigations” in the news would convince many voters that there must be something there, just as the 2016 ruckus over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails convinced many Americans that she had done something illegal.

It has worked. Although there is zero evidence of significant voter fraud, so far, 19 Republican-dominated states have passed 33 laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote, or to turn over the counting of votes to partisan Republicans. When Democrats tried to stop such a takeover of our democracy, all 50 Republicans in the Senate opposed federal protection of the right to vote. (Two Democrats joined them in refusing to overrule the filibuster, thus dooming the law to fail.) Now Republicans in three states have proposed election police forces to stop what they continue to insist—without evidence—are voting crimes.

And so, at the end of Biden’s first year—a year that by any standard must be called a success—Republicans are at the verge of achieving, at least for now, the end of the liberal democracy Americans have enjoyed since FDR and the Democrats embraced it in the 1930s, instead eroding the federal government and turning power over to the states.

In a two-hour press conference at the end of his first year, Biden said he did not anticipate the degree of obstruction he would face, and he expressed regret that he hadn’t “been able to…get my Republican friends to get in the game of making things better in this country….” “Think about this,” he said, “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that Senate Republicans will offer no legislative agenda before the 2022 elections and that he is “100 percent” focused “on stopping” Biden.

From the other side, Biden’s inaugural committee is celebrating the president’s first year in office with a video narrated by actor Tom Hanks in which ordinary Americans try to reclaim an older vision of an America in which we worked together for the good of all. They talk about how in the past year more than 200 million Americans have been vaccinated, how we have created more jobs in 2021 than in any year in the previous 80, how we lifted children out of poverty and are rebuilding roads and bridges, and how, historically, America is strong, courageous, resilient, and optimistic and can do anything, if only we will work together.

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Notes:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57667

https://www.axios.com/biden-one-year-inaugural-committee-ad-3c7597b5-490c-4f23-b919-5b97e10785db.html

https://www.wabe.org/kemp-says-3b-budget-boost-will-bring-a-lot-of-good-things/

https://theweek.com/foreign-policy/1007579/biden-nearly-ended-the-drone-war-and-nobody-noticed

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/01/21/dozens-of-democrats-call-out-biden-over-drone-strikes-kill-civilians.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/26/biden-kadhimi-seal-agreement-to-end-us-combat-mission-in-iraq

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/nord-stream-2-is-a-major-item-of-leverage-against-russia-ex-german-ambassador.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump/

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/1208/Why-GOP-is-stepping-up-fight-against-vaccine-mandates

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he-s-100-percent-focused-stopping-biden-s-n1266443

https://www.axios.com/mcconnell-no-agenda-midterms-91c73112-0a2e-441b-b713-7e8aa2dad6bf.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/19/biden-asks-what-are-republicans-republicans-have-already-chosen-not-answer/

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbonne-paris-france-citizenship-republic

Remember when the Republican Party demanded local control of schools? Insisted on local control?

No longer.

In its quest for school privatization, the GOP has turned firmly against local control of schools. The local school board is the biggest obstacle to privatization by charters, so Republican governors like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin create new state entities to bypass local school boards. It is hard to believe that Republicans were once staunch advocates for local control, but that was when the local school boards opposed desegregation.

Youngkin is proposing legislation that will enable “regional” boards, appointed by the State Board of Education (appointed by Youngkin), to authorize new charter schools. Local control is dead.

The Youngkin-backed charter school bill would let the state Board of Education create “regional charter school divisions” made up of two or three localities. Each of the localities would have to enroll at least 3,000 students and have at least one school struggling with accreditation.

The regional bodies would have the power to approve new charter schools, and would be made up of eight board members appointed by the state Board of Education, and one member appointed by the localities included in the regional division.

Under that system, localities would always have minority power and would be unable to reject charter school applicants — outnumbered by board members appointed by a charter-friendly state government.

Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham who introduced the bill, said the proposal addresses a key hurdle for charter schools to open in Virginia: That they need authorization to open from the local school district, which would compete with the school for enrollment and the funding attached to those students.

“We don’t have many people even applying because they know what the answer is going to be: no,” Obenshain said in an interview.

Republican solution to the problem: Eviscerate the power of the locally elected school boards and shift decisions to a board made up of Youngkin appointees.

This day honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is an appropriate time to consider the widespread efforts to restrict the teaching of racism in America’s schools. In Tennessee, the notorious “Moms for Liberty” declared that a second-grade book called Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington was inappropriate, as was Ruby Bridges Goes to School, about the six-year-old who was the first African-American child to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. The Central York School District in Pennsylvania banned books about Dr. King and Rosa Parks (parents, students, and teachers fought back against the ban in Central York); a Twitter account called Central York Banned Book Club (CYBannedBooks) reports on censorship in their own district and elsewhere. Young people today are not so easily bullied.

During the past couple of years, the nation’s public schools have been the object of savage attacks by politicians and ideologues who claim that the schools are teaching “critical race theory” and indoctrinating (white) children. CRT emphasizes the tenacity of systemic racism, and legislators in red states have passed laws mandating that teachers are not allowed to teach about systemic racism or to teach anything that might make some students (white) feel “uncomfortable.” At least 10 states have passed such laws, including Florida, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and North Dakota. Sometimes such laws are called “divisive concepts” laws, because they forbid the teaching of anything that is “divisive.” Teaching about racism is apparently divisive, as is any implication that the nation is or has been sexist or unwelcoming to specific racial or ethnic groups. So, no more teaching in history about race riots and massacres and lynching; no teaching in history about hostility to Irish immigrants; no teaching in history about anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

Much of the uproar was provoked by the publication of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project,” originally published as an issue of The New York Times Magazine and bearing the imprimatur of America’s most respected newspaper. In September 2020, Trump spoke at the National Archives Museum, standing before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, where he said that radicals and Marxists were responsible for “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” He singled out critical race theory and The 1619 Project as examples of left-wing indoctrination. He called for “patriotic education” He announced his intention to create the “1776 Commission,” which would “promote a ‘patriotic education’ and ‘encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.’”

The furor over critical race theory during 2021 has not subsided. Teachers in red states that have passed laws against CRT and divisive concepts are wary about teaching about racism. Is teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, and the persistence of segregation a violation of the law? Should teachers avoid any mention of the Ku Klux Klan or modern-day white supremacists?

In June 2021, more than 150 organizations–historians, educators, authors– signed a “Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History.” The joint statement forcefully criticized the laws that aimed to ban teaching about racism in a way that made “some” students uncomfortable. It said “these bills risk infringing on the right of faculty to teach and of students to learn…Purportedly, any examination of racism in this country’s classrooms might cause some students ‘discomfort’ because it is an uncomfortable and complicated subject. But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an informed public…Educators owe students a clear-eyed, nuanced, and frank delivery of history, so that they can learn, grow, and confront the issues of the day, not hew to some state-ordered ideology.”

The most puzzling aspect of this coordinated effort to suppress the teaching of accurate history is the silence of people who should have spoken up to defend the schools and their teachers.

The most prominent no-show on the ramparts is Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Last June, he testified before a Congressional committee and was asked about critical race theory. He responded that his department would leave curriculum decisions to states and local districts. He reiterated that the “the federal government doesn’t get involved in curriculum.” According to Chalkbeat, Cardona “said he trusts educators to do their jobs, including teaching about the progress this country has made combatting racism. ‘But I think we can do that while also being honest about some of the things we’re not proud of.” Those comments might be called “leading from behind.” Other than a comment here or there, Cardona did not make a major effort of combatting the attacks on schools and teacher over teaching about racism. He did not give a major speech, as he should have to defend teaching truth.

Other prominent absentees from the CRT-censorship-book banning controversy were the billionaires who usually are verbose about what schools and teachers should be doing.

Where was Bill Gates? Although rightwing wing-nuts attacked Bill Gates for spreading CRT, Gates said nothing to defend schools and teachers against the attacks on them. He is not known for shyness. He uses his platform to declaim his views on every manner of subject. Why the silence about teaching the nation’s history with adherence to the truth? Why no support for courageous teachers who stand up for honesty in the curriculum?

One could list the many other philanthropists who remained silent as the critics were beating up on schools for teaching honest history to their students. None of them was heard from.

Who else failed to show up and be counted on behalf of academic integrity?

Steven Singer examines Dr. Martin Luther King’s view of education by quoting from a paper that he wrote as an 18-year-old student at Morehouse College. The young King said that the purpose of education was “intelligence plus character,” not just the academic learning (a necessary ingredient, obviously) but an understanding and appreciation for “the accumulated experience of social living.” In this statement, King sounds very much like John Dewey, whom he had probably never read at this point in his life. When King wrote, there were two kinds of schools: private and public. Now there are many kinds, including voucher schools, religious schools, charter schools, home-schools, and public schools.

Singer writes:

So which schools today are best equipped to meet King’s ideal?

Private schools are by their very nature exclusionary. They attract and accept only certain students. These may be those with the highest academics, parental legacies, religious beliefs, or – most often – families that can afford the high tuition. As such, their student bodies are mostly white and affluent.

That is not King’s ideal. That is not the best environment to form character, the best environment in which to learn about people who are different than you and to develop mutual understanding.

Voucher schools are the same. They are, in fact, nothing but private schools that are subsidized in part by public tax dollars.

Charter schools model themselves on private schools so they are likewise discriminatory. The businesses who run these institutions – often for a profit – don’t have to enroll whoever applies. Even though they are fully funded by public tax dollars, they can choose who to let in and who to turn away. Often this is done behind the cloak of a lottery, but with no transparency and no one checking to ensure it is done fairly, there is no reason to believe operators are doing anything but selecting the easiest (read: cheapest) students to educate.

Charter schools have been shown to increase segregation having student bodies that are more monochrome than those districts from which they cherry pick students. This is clearly not King’s ideal..

There are many public schools where children of different races, nationalities, religions, and creeds meet, interact and learn together side-by-side.

Students wearing hajibs learn next to those wearing yarmulkes. Students with black skin and white skin partner with each other to complete class projects. Students with parents who emigrated to this country as refugees become friends with those whose parents can trace their ancestors back to the Revolutionary War.

These schools are true melting pots where children learn to become adults who value each other because of their differences not fear each other due to them. These are children who not only learn their academics as well – if not often better – than those at competing kinds of schools, but they also learn the true face of America and they learn to cherish it.

This is the true purpose of education. This is the realization of King’s academic ideal and his civil rights dream.

But Singer realizes that many public schools do not meet this ideal. Segregation has intensified in recent years, due to judicial and political retrenchment. Some public schools are richly endowed with resources, while others are not. But public schools permit the possibility of change and improvement.

He adds:

If we want to reclaim what it means to be an American, if we want to redefine ourselves as those who celebrate difference and defend civil rights, that begins with understanding the purpose of education.

It demands we defend public schools against privatization. And it demands that we transform our public schools into the integrated, equitable institutions we dreamed they could all be.